Joe Victim: A Thriller

So now she’s back and Sally obviously isn’t pleased, but there’s not a lot she can do about it. Melissa finishes off her breakfast. It’s not as healthy as she’d have liked, but a good meal. A filling meal. The kind of meal you want on the morning of the day your boyfriend might not make it back out of.

By now Raphael will be at the office building. He’ll have assembled the gun and have changed into the police uniform. She can imagine him sitting down and trying to contain his nerves. Maybe he brought a photograph of his daughter along with him to keep him company. Melissa is worried about just how nervous he’s going to be, and whether those nerves are going to send his bullet off target.

There were always cracks in her plan. But now they’re becoming more obvious.

She’s starting to worry.

The nerves that weren’t there during the night have rolled into town, so much so that suddenly she doesn’t see any way for the plan to work. She should cut her losses, cut Sally free, and move on.

Instead of doing any of that, she leaves Sally tied up on the bedroom floor and she drives into town. Traffic is thick, but she’s allowed for it. There’s roadworks and renovations going on in and around the hospital parking lot. She checked it out a few days ago and confirmed what she suspected—that there are no security cameras in the lot. That’s the thing about Christchurch—the places there ought to be cameras there never are. Or perhaps that’s the thing about hospitals—they figure a good old-fashioned beating isn’t a big deal when the victims only have to drag themselves thirty yards for help. Or maybe they see it as being good for business. She drives there now, past a construction crew rolling out a new piece of pavement, who all pause what they’re doing to stare at her. She’s not wearing the fat suit. She smiles at them, then parks around the back and locks up the van. She drops some coins into the meter and takes the ticket that comes out and rests it on the dashboard before grabbing the rucksack and locking up. She walks toward the hospital. Jackhammering and engine noise and men talking loudly bounce off every surface all around her. She’s wearing Sally’s dark blue nurse’s scrubs. It’s not a great fit, but outside of porn movies and get-well singing telegrams, scrubs never are. That’s not all she took from Sally. She uses Sally’s swipe card to open a staff-only door. She steps into a corridor that’s air-conditioned on a day where it really doesn’t need to be. It’s about sixty feet long with no natural light and dozens of fluorescent tubes in the ceiling. She walks its length and uses the swipe card to gain access to the emergency department. She keeps walking. She takes another corridor and follows the directions Sally was willing to give her. Well, perhaps willing isn’t quite the word Sally would use. After all, Melissa had lifted Sally’s pajama top and squeezed the muffin-top waist and threatened to cut it off.

It’d been worse for Sally three months ago. Back then Melissa had forced her to strip naked. She had taken photos of her in compromising positions. Sally had just received a fifty-thousand-dollar reward for her help in Joe’s capture, and Melissa wanted what was left of that money. So she photographed Sally and that made up part of what she used to blackmail her. The other part is something she needs to discuss with Joe when the timing is right. Three months ago with Sally naked and tied to the bed, Melissa had considered paying somebody to come and rape her, to take photos of that too to make it even worse. She wasn’t sure she had enough money to cover it, because whoever took on the job was going to ask for a lot. Ultimately it didn’t get that far. A voice inside her—perhaps belonging to Smelly Melly, or perhaps belonging to her former self before she got this way—told her that with all the line crossing she’d been doing that was one thing that was just too far. She agreed and felt ashamed she had even thought of it, and Melissa hadn’t felt shame in a long time.

She makes her way to the ambulance bay. It’s situated near a staff room, where nurses and doctors are sitting around drinking coffee and reading magazines, while the other nurses and doctors are playing nurses and doctors in broom closets and bathrooms. She waits by the ambulances and fiddles around on her cell phone because that’s what people do in this day and age when they want to look like they’re doing something other than stalking or looking alone. She knows what to look for—the ambulance crew that isn’t in a hurry.

It takes five minutes. Then they step out of the staff room. A man and a woman, both wearing paramedic outfits that don’t fit much better than her own. They’re chatting and laughing. They’re not on their way to a road crash or a shooting or a heart attack. They split up and each moves around to one side of the ambulance. The woman is driving. She fires up the engine. Melissa taps on the passenger-side window and the guy winds it down, a good-looking guy in his late twenties who has every chance of living through this if he just does the right thing.

“Hey,” he says.